Book Review: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Set mainly in 1950s rural North Dakota, The Night Watchman is a captivating historical fiction centering around a controversial bill about to be put forward to congress. This bill claims to be about emancipation for Native Americans, but in fact aims to take away what little land they already have. One of our main protagonists,…
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Book Review: A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter
A Grandmother Begins the Story is a powerful and unique novel that tells the story of one fractured Métis family through a chorus of voices. We meet five generations of women, including voices coming through from the afterlife: Carter, Allie, Lucie, Geneviève, Velma and Mamé, with whom our story begins. Alongside their stories runs the…
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Book Review – The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
After having loved Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women, I was keen to read more by her, and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane might just have cemented See as a go-to author for me. In a remote mountain village in China, steeped in tradition, ritual and superstition, Li-yan lives and works, farming tea…
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Book Review – I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan
When Áine’s flatmate Laura moves out to move in with her boyfriend, the natural progression is for Aíne to move in with her boyfriend Elliott. So begins the stressful search for a place to call home. They can’t believe their luck when they find a place, just about in budget, in a trendy neighbourhood; but…
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Book Review – Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh
School is done for seventeen-year-old John Masterson, living on an island off Ireland’s west coast. The summer holidays loom ahead, full of potential and the uncertainty of what comes next. John is determined to make his mark on the football pitch, if he could just find his place in the team and play in the…
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Book Review – The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
The Island of Sea Women, set largely on the remote Korean island of Jeju, is a stunning and gripping story centering around two best friends, and spanning decades. Filled with heartache and hardship, with deep friendship, first love and devastating losses, and set across times of national and global upheaval, this was a story I…
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Book Review – Cork Stories
Cork Stories is a collection of contemporary short fiction set throughout Co Cork in Ireland, from the urban spaces to coastal towns and most rural corners, by writers who live in, or have some strong connection to, Cork. I love this concept for a collection, taking one place and viewing it through a variety of…
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Book Review – Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
When Suchi meets Haiwen as children in 1930s Shanghai, she is immediately drawn to the small, quietly self-assured boy. Wrapped up in his world of music, he dreams of being a violinist, while she dreams of being a singer. A friendship blossoms and before they know it feelings have grown. But Shanghai is under Japanese…
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Book Review – May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett
When Shauna leaves Dublin City for the suburbs with her mother, Dean enters her life as part of a soon-to-be-inseparable foursome of friends navigating the trials and tribulations of adolescence. The spark of friendship quickly blossoms towards something more for Shauna and Dean but, with their own struggles and ties pulling them separate ways, they…
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Book Review – Mouthing by Orla Mackey
Mouthing is a series of confessional monologues, deftly sewn together, from voices hailing from one village in rural Ireland, which is ‘just about as good and as bad as you’ll get anywhere’. Divided into sections, illuminating different generations and points in time, each section explores a different story or situation from several different perspectives, inching…
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Book Review – Becoming Marlow Fin by Ellen Won Steil
A storm rages outside Isla’s family holiday cabin by Lake Superior, where she has come with her parents and grandmother Moni. As she looks out into the darkness, the face of a young girl is looking back at her. When the girl turns and runs, Isla darts outside, following without thinking. That fateful night brings…
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Book Review – The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
It’s 1975 and summer camp at a remote preserve in the Adirondack mountains, Northeastern New York, is drawing towards a close. Then one of the teenagers, Barbara, goes missing. But she isn’t just any camper, she is the daughter of the affluent Van Laar family, whose picturesque lands of forests and lakes around their grand…
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Book Review – True Love by Paddy Crewe
Keely has grown up living with her Dad and young brother at a caravan camp by the rugged coast, collecting coal from the unforgiving sea and delivering it to locals. When tragedy strikes, Keely’s life as she knows it is upended. Finn has grown up with his grandparents, never having known his parents. Shy, uncomfortable…
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Book Review – Teddy by Emily Dunlay
Teddy Huntley Carlyle from Dallas, Texas has always dreamed of a glamorous and exciting life elsewhere. So when she meets and marries David, his job drawing them to Rome, it seems like this dream might finally be becoming reality, as she is swept into the heart of the elite diplomatic circles of the American community…
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Book Review – Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
14-year-old Cora Mowat is growing up in 1990s Fife, on a council estate in post-industrial Scotland, and life is not easy. It’s just her, her mum who’s in a wheelchair, and her mum’s boyfriends who pass through over the years. Money is scarce, school is a challenge, friendships can be tricky, and things would definitely…
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Book Review – Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Isla, Irene and Agnes. Three sisters with a fractured relationship and tetchy dynamic, drawn back together after their father’s death. Navigating a city of perpetual rain, where the dead can’t be buried or they will actually rise again, the sisters move through, and exist in, this sodden landscape; a place where the daily produce many…
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Book Review – The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
Our story begins in 1891 in Butte, Montana, a rowdy mining town high in the Rocky Mountains full of immigrants seeking their fortune, and many Irish among them. Here we meet dope-smoking, hard-drinking Tom Rourke, burdened by premonitions, full of despair and yet clinging to hope; a writer who writes songs for those in need…
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Book Review – Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Restless in life and just out of a relationship, Iris moves back in with her mother. Walking the fields one day, she sees a woman; there is something magnetic, seductive, a bit unkempt about the woman, who she comes to know as Hazel, and who will lead her to Breach House, a rural refuge of…
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Book Review – Wild Ground by Emily Usher
When we meet Jennifer, she’s working in a London cafe, working hard to leave her past behind her; but when her past walks back into her present, we are taken back to her childhood and adolescence, to a time and place where she was known as Neef, and Neef and Danny were inseparable, until the…
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Book Review – The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
It’s the 1960s in a rural part of The Netherlands and Isabel lives alone in a large, rambling house, her mother dead and her brothers Hendrik and Louis off living their own lives. Always a solitary soul and an outsider, she becomes inextricably linked to the house, its walls and contents all tangible links to…
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Book Review – The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna
Lauren, a writing teacher just outside Washington D.C, is drifting through life, still grieving the sudden loss of her parents years earlier. An attentive, engaged teacher and friend to everyone in class, outside class she is unanchored and alone. While teaching her international class, she meets a kindred spirit in Siri, a young, charismatic Swedish…
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Book Review – The Marriage Sabbatical by Lian Dolan
Jason and Nicole are set to go on the trip of a lifetime motorbiking around South America; Jason’s trip of a lifetime, that is. Nicole is dreading it, and is brewing her own getaway to Santa Fe, to follow her dream in jewellery design. But how to make Jason come around to the idea of…
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Book Review – Academy Street by Mary Costello
Academy Street by Mary Costello is a sweeping and deeply moving story, a short book that spans decades, taking us from 1940s rural Ireland to 21st century New York. When we meet Tess first, her childlike voice relays her confused feelings and observations of those around her as she copes with the death of her…
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Book Review – A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume
Overwhelmed by urban life in Dublin, and life in general, artist Frankie, in her 20s, withdraws to live in her late grandmother’s rundown bungalow in the countryside. The novel moves back and forth in time, from her time in the bungalow to the city life she was fleeing to her rural childhood. With limited human…
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Book Review – Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald
Jean is a gentle young girl growing up in 1970s and 1980s Dublin, living with her authoritarian and volatile father, her mother and siblings. She has a loving relationship with her mother until a new pregnancy leaves her exhausted. Jean’s solace at home is in her baby brother John and kind but meek Aunty Ida,…
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Book Review – The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird
It’s 1950s America and Lois, in her 20s, is making her way west. Stuck in a loveless marriage, Nevada’s laws will allow her a quick, clean divorce. All she has to do is be resident there for six weeks. So she spends her weeks at the Golden Yarrow, one of the more upmarket ‘divorce ranches’…
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Book Review – Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
Memory Piece is the story of three Asian American women, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, whose lives collide in a small moment of rebellion when they are teenage girls searching for more from life, and they continue to go in and out of each other’s lives, in person and digitally, for over half a century. From…
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Book Review – On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel
We’re like the women before us, Arc. We carry great terrors on our backs. We take them to bed with us the same demons. Twins Arc and Daffy live in the industrial town of Chillicothe, Ohio. Living with their mother and aunt in the shadow of addiction, poverty and prostitution, the girls cling to each…
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Book Review – Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh
When Obiefuna’s father sees a brief, intimate moment between his teenage son and a boy apprenticed to the family, Obiefuna is sent away to a strict religious boarding school. Torn from his mother Uzoamaka’s side, with whom he has a close and loving relationship, and cast into a world of tough boys, each trying to…
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Book Review – Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
Signal Fires is a poignant, moving and beautifully written portrait of two families living on Division Street; a suburban American street where the families live quietly side by side and where everyone still has their secrets, crossing paths only occasionally but at the most pivotal times in their lives. Ben and Mimi Wilf, and their…
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Book Review – Jaded by Ela Lee
On paper, Jade has it all: a successful law career, the daughter who has made her parents proud, a great boyfriend from an affluent family, and a small but solid circle of girlfriends. Then one work night out throws everything into a downward spiral as she wakes up with no idea how she got home,…
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Fourteen Days – ed. by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Fourteen days: the period over which our novel unfolds, as the tenants of one run-down New York apartment block gather (with social distancing!) each evening on the rooftop, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, to cheer on the frontline workers and then share, and listen to, stories drawn from their own experience. We…
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Book Review – Stealing by Margaret Verble
9-year-old Kit Crockett lives in rural 1950s America with her father, with whom she is close, but both are dealing with the grief of her mother’s death and somehow unable to comfort each other. Passing her spare time fishing and reading books, Kit lives a quiet life until a mysterious and beautiful woman moves into…
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Book Review – Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Kambili and Jaja live a strict, regimented life within the walls of their affluent estate, under the iron rule of their highly religious father. A prominent and benevolent figure within the community, he is in many ways a force for good; but behind closed doors he wields a force of a different kind. When a…
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Book Review – Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Shaker Heights, Ohio, is an idyllic, affluent suburban estate, where everything is planned and everyone lives in sync. Mrs. Richardson is a force at the centre of this golden community but when bohemian artist Mia and her daughter Pearl arrive in town, and move into a house owned by the Richardsons, the two families, who…
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Book Review – My Father the Whale by Gina Perry
Families we have, families we choose and families we long for. The only family 9-year-old Ruby has ever known is her father; nomadic, free-spirited, self-absorbed Mitch. Since the death of her mother soon after her birth, Ruby and Mitch have lived an unconventional life, moving across Australia from town to town, busking, entertaining the locals…
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Book Review – The Island of Longing by Anne Griffin
One afternoon, Rosie looks out from an upstairs window as her teenage daughter Saoirse approaches home on her bike. Stepping away to finish up a few tasks before making her way down to greet her, Rosie is met only by her son when she gets downstairs. Saoirse’s bike is lying outside at the side of…
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Book Review – Kala by Colin Walsh
We’re perched on our bikes at the top of the hill. There’s a turning melt of sky above us. The town’s glittering below. We’re fifteen and it’s the summer of our lives so Kinlough is gathering itself up into the moment with us – the whole town’s pure responsive to our energies. The year is…
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Book Review – The Break
A young woman holding her baby at night looks out the window into the darkness and witnesses what she believes to be a devastating act of violence occurring on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house. Moving back and forth in time, The Break by Katherena Vermette…
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Book Review – Julia by Sandra Newman
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. When I first read George Orwell’s 1984 back in school, I was part terrified, part mesmerised, and absolutely captivated by Orwell’s capacity for capturing this chilling vision of a future, totalitarian world presided over by the ominous and omnipresent Big Brother. So when I read…
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Book Review – The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
The Wren, The Wren is a story of three parts, three people: Nell, a young woman in search of adventure, her mother Carmel, and Carmel’s father Phil, the famous poet. Moving back and forth in time, between characters, between first person narrative and third, this multi-generational novel explores love, sex, the complexities and messiness of…
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Book Review – The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
In her prologue, Vanessa Chan tells us that The Storm We Made is inspired by her grandparents’ generation’s reluctant stories about the period 1941 – 1945 in Malaya (now Malaysia) known as the Japanese Occupation. Unfolding through four perspectives – that of Cecily and her three children Jujube, Abel and Jasmin – this is a…
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Book Review – One Friday in Napa by Jennifer Hamm
Deep in the Napa Valley, a story of past and present unfolds. When Vene learns that her mother Olivia is nearing death, she reluctantly returns to her family home, only to find her mother as cold and difficult as ever; but when Vene discovers an old cookbook, filled with revelatory notes, a whole new side…
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Book Review – The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
A strange, strange tale so full of hardship but also balanced by moments of real beauty. There is starvation, disease, punishing cold, desolation, violence and sublime but unforgiving terraines, but also startling moments of clarity, of profound realisation, and deep connection with the natural world. The story opens with our protagonist, known for most of…
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Book Review – Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a story told to us by our narrator Kathy in 1990s England, as she looks back on her adolescence beginning in a picturesque, rural boarding school. As the reminiscing begins, and unfolds, this could be any adolescence; the friendships, in particular with her best friends Ruth and…
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Book Review – Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff
A nightmare vision of Dublin with only whispers of the city as we know it, Silent City is a world of warrior women called banshees, foul and terrifying beings called skrake that fall somewhere between the living and the dead, breeders, wallers, farmers, and shanties, all ruled by the ominous and brutish management. Inside the…
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Book Review – The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I’ve loved everything I’ve read so far by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a writer who weaves captivating and compelling stories of great strength, populated by characters so vividly brought to life that we find ourselves really feeling with them. From the devastating effects of political and social unrest on everyday families to traditional religion and culture…
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Book Review – My Husband by Maud Ventura
My Husband, the debut novel by Maud Ventura, translated from the original French by Emma Ramadan, is a slow moving, intense and deliciously dark psychological portrait of a marriage and domestic dynamic; a marriage of games and rules, offences and corresponding punishments, of hypothetical drama… all in our narrator’s head alone. The novel opens strong,…
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Book Review – Weave by Oein DeBhairduin & Deirdre Sullivan. Illustrated by Yingge Xu
Weave is a stunning work of literary art; a collaboration between writers Oein DeBhairduin and Deirdre Sullivan, and artist Yingge Xu. Containing eight stories inspired by the eight festivals in the wheel of the year, the flip reverse format – one side of the book starts with Sullivan’s stories and to read DeBhairduin’s you flip…
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Book Review – Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood is the story of Elaine, a painter who, on returning to her childhood city of Toronto for her grand retrospective exhibition, finds memories of her past flooding back to her – but happy memories they are not. The novel opens in a really clever and intriguing way – Elaine is…
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Book Review – Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, and a pretty great chemist at that, but a series of enraging and tragic events leave her with no choice but to take a job hosting a TV cookery show. However, it comes as no surprise, having come to know Elizabeth, that this is not going to wind up like…
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Book Review – Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good tells the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie, taken from their families as young children to be placed in a church-run residential school. Eventually discharged at different times and sent away on the cusp of an adulthood they are in no way prepared for, their journeys converge…
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Book Review – Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult
Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult is a collection of short stories first published in 1950 and, while the language, and social and historical references, sometimes clearly place this in times gone by, there are aspects of the social commentary, and meditations on young love and community dynamics, that could be much more recent. And this…
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Book Review – Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Based on historical facts, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1830. Condemned to death for her part in the murder of two men, with no prisons in Iceland at the time, Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to…
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Book Review – Florida by Lauren Groff
Florida by Lauren Groff is a strange, atmospheric, unsettling and absolutely captivating collection of short stories. While the book blurb says it’s the landscape, climate, history and state of mind of the titular American State that binds these stories, the overarching element permeating most of this collection is Florida’s extreme weather, terrain and wildlife, used…
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Book Review – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fresh off listening to Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I loved, I downloaded the audiobook of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2007. This was also read by Adjoa Andoh, who read the last one so beautifully. Half of a Yellow Sun, set in 1960s Nigeria,…
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Book Review – Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. Out he went. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is a bold and vibrant novel exploring the lives of eight very…
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Book Review – Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong
Falling Animals is a novel that reads as a finely woven series of linked stories that are all part of one greater story, a chorus of voices each adding a piece of the puzzle in the mystery of an unidentified dead man who appears on the beach of a seaside town; each character in some…
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Book Review – Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson opens at the beginning of a hot summer that will change everything for our narrator, Stephen, and his friends; school is finished, capturing that moment between childhood and adulthood with all its uncertainty and potential, and the future is both frightening and exciting. By the end of this summer…
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Book Review – A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop
A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop is a collection of short stories that capture the devastation of lives and landscapes, the losses suffered and the voids created, the fear of the immediate future and the hope for healing, following a series of Australian bushfires. The searing heat, the smell of smoke and the taste of…
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Book Review – Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a moving story of a love tested by time, distance and circumstance, but it’s also so much more than that. At 17 hours audio/around 400 pages, this is a sweeping and epic novel embodying so much and exploring so many themes; love, identity and personal evolution, the different relationships…
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Book Review – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy is, at its heart, a story about an ill-fated love affair but its beauty and strength is that it becomes so much more than that, painting a rich and vibrant portrait of a whole community beyond our two lovers. This story is about an unexpected and forbidden love between young Catholic…
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Book Review – Devotion by Hannah Kent
Why do men bother with churches at all when instead they might make cathedrals out of sky and water? Better a chorus of birds than a choir. Better an altar of leaves. Baptise me in rainfall and crown me with sunrise. Devotion by Hannah Kent begins in 19th century Prussia, in a small community of…
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Book Review – Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
This is our dancing time. It’s 1978, and Yamaye and her friends live in a small, industrial town on the edge of London, once a site of pagan rituals, where they dance with the dead. This town of cemeteries and ghosts is brought to life at the weekend by the dub reggae beats in an…
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Book Review – Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Your Driver is Waiting is a razor sharp and darkly comic vision of a contemporary city, viewed through our RideShare driver Damani’s eyes as she cruises through it, its inhabitants’ lives flashing before her. This unnamed city is heaving with people, simmering with an undercurrent of threat, and wracked with protests and riots. Driving long…
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Book Review – The Colony by Audrey Magee
It’s the summer of 1979, and an English painter and a French linguist both travel to a small island off the West Coast of Ireland where Irish remains the primary spoken language. What follows is a beautifully written and layered exploration of the idyllic and mythologised view they each hold of this place, versus the…
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Book Review – A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò
A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò is a novel that illuminates and explores, with great candour and heart, two very different sides of modern Nigeria. Wúràolá, a young doctor from a wealthy family, is weighed down by the punishing hours and strained environment of her job, and the pressure from her family and…
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Book Review – The White Rock by Anna Hope
The White Rock by Anna Hope is an epic journey bringing us backwards and forwards in time through four different story lines, unfolding decades and centuries apart, loosely bound together by the powerful Mexican landscape within which they take place, and by the echoes that run through them. The Writer (2020), the Singer (1969), the…
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Book Review – Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days. It’s 1964 in wintry New England, and Eileen does not have it good. Living in a run-down house with her alcoholic father – a bully she mostly despises but remains dutiful too – Eileen is a young woman who drapes and drowns herself in…
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Book Review – Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story of two parts and two worlds, a story that encapsulates two very different sides of Haruki Murakami’s writing. One part: a Tokyo muchly similar to contemporary Tokyo but with a cyber twist, where our narrator lives a life typical to all Murakami’s male narrators…
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Book Review – Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton
Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton is a dynamic and compulsive multigenerational story that moves back and forth in time and place, between mother Sook-Yin and daughter Lily, between Hong Kong and London, spanning four decades from the 1960s to 1990s. It’s a story of love and betrayal; of the struggles of dual-heritage identity; of…
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Book Review – Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah
When Efe and Sam meet in 1990s London, Efe is burdened by the expectations of her parents, who sent her to London from Ghana in hopes of a better future, while Sam is consumed by his studies in pursuit of a career in law. They come and go from each other, in ebbs and flows,…
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Book Review – Avalon by Nell Zink
Avalon by Nell Zink is a quirky and satirically philosophical coming-of-age novel with a resilient underdog as its narrator. Bran is not having it easy; with a dysfunctional family and unusual upbringing, she was abandoned by first her father and then her mother, one for the promise of Australia and the other for the promise…
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Book Review – I Wanted To Be Close To You by Katie Oliver
I Wanted To Be Close To You by Katie Oliver is a collection of darkly humorous and sharply written short stories exploring the female experience in particular, written at a snappy pace that perfectly suits their short length. In fact, these stories are so short – some merely a page long – that they emerge…
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Interview – Paper Visual Art
At a time when the Irish cultural scene is alive and kicking with predominantly literary journals, PVA is an initiative which has carved out a very special place of its own. With its origins as an art journal, it has since evolved into a space where contributions on visual art, contemporary culture and literature sit…
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Book Review – Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and we burned it and it’s gone now. Written in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison is a novel that merges science fiction and the dystopian with detective story and a little bit of a love story thrown in…
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Book Review- I, Antigone by Carlo Gébler
It’s fair to say that most stories are never as straightforward as they might initially seem, and we seem to be living in a heyday of readapted and reimagined stories from antiquity, with a focus on revealing new perspectives and unleashing unheard, or even silenced, voices. Inevitably, the female voice is now often placed centre…
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Book Review – The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo
The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo, billed as a classic Japanese murder mystery, is a tale about a family fortune, a family feud and family secrets, revolving around the explosive, divisive and extremely complex will left by Sahei Inugami, patriarch of the Inugami Clan. When Detective Kindaichi gets a tip-off that the old man has…
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Book Review – South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami is a story of childhood soulmates, who drift apart in adolescence before meeting again years later. Hajime, our narrator, and Shimamoto meet as children and, as two rare only children in their neighbourhood, they naturally develop a bond; but, as time progresses, this bond…
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End of Reading Challenge
The 20 Books of Summer 22 reading challenge, instigated by Cathy at 746books.com, has come to a close for another year and, while I didn’t read all 20 from my original list, this was the most I have read in years and I enjoyed it so much that I have every intention of keeping it…
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Book Review – How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong
How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong is a strange and sharp collection of short stories, that packs so much into a small book. The stories are so different, the main unifying element being a foray into the unsettling and the jarring. There are stories where things may or may not have happened; or…
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Book Review – The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a sharply spun tale from an unnamed Irish town, resonating with familiar societal elements yet crafted with care so that each story gains unique significance and emotional depth. Told from an array of different perspectives – men, women and children, of all ages, backgrounds and circumstances – this…
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Book Review – Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura is a magical but ultimately profound tale that weaves Japanese culture and tradition, fantasy and Western fairytales with a meditation on the complexities and pressures of adolescence. Kokoro has been staying home from school, following a traumatic incident, as she weighs up the option of transferring to…
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Book Review – The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan
The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan is a tender and poignant multigenerational story about the Aylward women from a small, rural village in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. These are women who have known heartbreak, tragedy and judgement, and yet they love so fiercely, fight on in life, and hold each other up; and it’s…
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Book Review – Savage Her Reply by Deirdre Sullivan
We are ourselves, and we are also stories people tell. Savage Her Reply by Deirdre Sullivan is a reimagining of the classic Irish fairy tale The Children of Lir. When Aífe’s imposed marriage to her dead sister’s widower, King Lir, dissolves into a state of unhappiness, Aífe enacts a cruel revenge by condemning her stepchildren…
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Book Review – The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
No more regrets for what I haven’t done. Now only regrets for what I have done. The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller is a story that expands on a pivotal 24 hours in our narrator Elle Bishop’s present, by slowly revealing 50 years of her past that starkly illuminate how she came to this…
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Book Review – Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh
My name is Calla and I wanted to choose. In a world where a key element of a woman’s fate is decided by a crude, ticketed lottery system, Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh is the story of one woman’s rebellion against this imposed destiny, compelled by a dark and powerful driving force within her. In…
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Book Review – The Raptures by Jan Carson
I think it’s safe to say that Jan Carson is now one of my go-to authors from this island; I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her so far, The Fire Starters in particular, and with The Raptures she’s done it again with a story that is gripping, thought-provoking and downright enjoyable to read, despite the…
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Book Review – Dance Move by Wendy Erskine
Dance Move by Wendy Erskine is a collection of short stories that brings to life a broad and varied cast of characters, each trying to move forwards in their lives. Binding these stories together is the profound impact that moments in our past can have, either shaping how our lives have progressed or simply resurfacing…
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Book Review – Wunderland by Caitríona Lally
Wunderland by Caitríona Lally is a wonderfully conjured portrait of two siblings, each with their own quirks and each struggling with life in their own way. Roy has been swiftly and quietly exiled to Germany, after some rumoured scandal back home in Ireland, to work in Hamburg’s miniature model railway world. Gert, one of his…
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Book Review – Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell
Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell is a short story collection exploring the experiences of young women trying to make their way in this world. The cover design by Jack Smyth now seems particularly apt. These are particular women, yet these could be any woman; the stories detail experiences which are often both personal and, at their…
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Book Review – Of Sunshine and Bedbugs by Isaac Babel
Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories by Isaac Babel is a newly curated collection of stories by Russian author Isaac Babel (1894 – 1940), translated into English by Boris Dralyuk, that draws from previous collections of his stories also translated by Dralyuk. This collection opens with a new and enlightening foreword by Dralyuk, as well…
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Book Review – The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is a beautiful and captivating novel about love and loss, identity and displacement, devastation and renewal. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, the story spans several points in time across almost half a century, taking us from war-torn Cyprus of the 1970’s to London of the late 2010s.…
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Book Review – Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Fight Night by Miriam Toews is an exuberant and compelling story about three generations of women, living together in a house in Toronto which is loud, chaotic and full of cursing but, at its heart, brimming with love. Our nine-year-old narrator Swiv lives with pregnant Mom and elderly Grandma. When Swiv is expelled from school…
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20 Books of Summer ’22
The Challenge 20 Books of Summer is an annual online reading challenge hosted by Cathy Brown of 746books.com, whereby you select a list of 20 books (a great way to make a dent in that ever-growing TBR pile) that you will read, and review, within the time frame (June 1 – September 1 2022). This…
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Book Review – Actress by Anne Enright
Actress by Anne Enright is a beautifully conjured portrait of the life of Katherine O’Dell, fictional star of the stage and screen, as told by her daughter Norah. As Norah is coming to terms with the more difficult later years of her mother’s life, and is approached by a student looking to tell Katherine’s story…
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Book Review – Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney is a story of intertwining and shifting friendships and relationships, infatuation, self-discovery, and learning to navigate unexpected emotions. College students Frances and Bobbi, now friends but once in a relationship, meet charismatic journalist and photographer Melissa, who becomes interested in their spoken word performances, and begins inviting them to…
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Book Review – A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion
When 12-year-old Ellen Gallagher and her mother get into a heated argument on the drive home one night, along a dark and desolate road, a snap decision made by the mother is to have consequences that will reverberate, through their own family and their little community, for the rest of that summer. A Crooked Tree…
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Interview – —Love, says Bloom curated by Nuala O’Connor
—Love, says Bloom, is a new exhibition at MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland), celebrating the love at the heart of the Joyce family. Irish writer James Joyce, his wife Nora Barnacle, and their children Giorgio and Lucia faced many hardships in their life together, but also shared a deep love and devotion to each other.…
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Book Review – The Last Resort by Jan Carson
The Last Resort is a collection of ten linked short stories by Jan Carson, each focusing on the existential plight of one of the residents staying at Seacliff Caravan Park. Far from the idyllic sun and laughter filled caravan parks of happy childhood summers, Seacliff is huddled at the edge of a remote, blustery cliff…
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The Resting Willow 